[TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode
Mary Ann Horton
mah at mhorton.net
Mon Mar 13 09:35:24 AEST 2017
That's interesting, Clem. It would be useful to date the real date of
the first email attachment sent. Right now the only firm date we have
is 6/1/80. Do you have any old email or copy of uuencode that could
establish an earlier date?
Thanks,
Mary Ann
On 03/12/2017 10:42 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> I think it might actually predates 6/1/80 by 6-9 months because I was
> at Tek a year earlier and you and I started corresponding that first
> summer I was at Tek. I remember that you had sent me a copy of it
> shortly after you wrote it. So I think there is a chance that that
> might be a slightly later version.
>
> Clem
>
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net
> <mailto:mah at mhorton.net>> wrote:
>
> I just heard from a historian named Piotr Klaban with an
> interesting historical sidelight.
>
> Apparently today 3/11/17 is being publicized as the 25th
> anniversary of the email attachment, citing Nat Borenstein's
> MIME. Piotr points out that uuencode predates MIME, and he's right.
>
> I checked and, while I don't have any email archives from that
> time frame at Berkeley, I was able to find the 4BSD archive on
> minnie that dates the uuencode.1c man page at 6/1/80. We didn't
> call them attachments back then, just sending binary files by
> email. (Prior to then it was common to just include the text of
> the file raw in the email, which only worked for ASCII files.) It
> was a few years later when cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail started
> calling uuencoded files embedded in email "attachments".
>
> When MIME came out in 1992 I became a champion of SMTP/MIME as a
> standard - it was a big improvement. But uuencod predated MIME by
> 12 years.
>
> Mary Ann
>
>
>
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